Tag Archives: mental health

-A mental illness is a medical condition that disrupts a person’s thinking, feeling, mood, ability to relate to others and daily functioning. Just as diabetes is a disorder of the pancreas, mental illnesses are medical conditions that often result in a diminished capacity for coping with the ordinary demands of life.

-Mental illnesses can affect persons of any age, race, religion or income. Mental illnesses are not the result of personal weakness, lack of character or poor upbringing. Mental illnesses are treatable. Most people diagnosed with a serious mental illness can experience relief from their symptoms by actively participating in an individual treatment plan.

-During the first full week of October, NAMI and participants across the country are bringing awareness to mental illness. Each year we fight stigma, provide support, educate the public and advocate for equal care. Each year, the movement grows stronger.

I wouldn’t dare deny the truth in the above statements. Nothing I’m about to say here is meant to diminish the significance of the condition, to deny the need for medication, or to boil it all down to some woo woo “just meditate and open your heart” mantra….. but I guess maybe because of the general lack of holistic perspective used to treat medical conditions by traditional medical professionals, the above definition of mental illness strikes me as kind of surfacey or too clinical or… something.

It’s my understanding that at it’s core this medical condition, these mental illnesses, are mental imbalances born out of our dis-ease at being in the body, in the world. We’re born free and wide open, and then life starts to happen. And it keeps on happening. In one way or another, by major traumas or minor incidents, our authentic self is misunderstood or rejected or betrayed, and we create defense mechanisms to protect us from again feeling unloved, unaccepted, unworthy, inferior. When the authentic self (basically your heart) has been rejected or hurt in some way, it seems to be the natural human response to protect oneself from having that happen again. So we may build walls around that self to keep the pain out, or become hyper vigilant- always on the lookout for the red flags that danger is imminent then planning escape routes or attack plans. These become our patterns. They’re the operating system running the whole program. And because our society teaches us to look without for relief, for fulfillment and love and peace and joy, our chances of looking within to identify the dysfunction and then consciously choose to upgrade to the operating system effortlessly running the preferred programs are slim.

These imbalances may be great or small, but I believe we all have them to a certain extent. I don’t think anyone is impervious to the precarious nature of the human condition. It must be part of the journey, part of the point of it all. We’re individual expressions of the infinite intelligence of the universe. We incarnate here and we forget that. We believe that we are who we have been conditioned to become, separate from everything else. All of the experiences laid before us we have chosen to help wake us up to remember our authentic self. I guess that means that we choose the experiences that go into the forgetting, too.

Certainly, I digress. I just mean to say that to a certain extent, we’ve all gotten out of alignment with who we really are, identifying instead with the mind and the chaotic thoughts swirling around it. Since our thoughts influence our feelings and create our reality, this incongruence manifests with the imbalances in the mind affecting the ways in which we relate to ourselves and each other. And that’s what it’s all about. How we relate to ourselves and each other. Which is really the same thing. Ideally we’d have a balanced mind and an open heart to freely engage with both the world around and inside of us.

So be aware of your mental health. Be aware of your self. This special day is for mental health education, awareness and advocacy. I am aware that I am prone to depression and anxiety. Perhaps more so than your average bear. I have taken medication, it wasn’t for me. I am a big fan of therapy. All I know for sure though is that the biggest relief has come through the act of allowing, loving…well, simply feeling the feelings. They come and they go. And no feeling ever killed me, even though I was scared to death it might. That’s just it. The fear of the feeling is deadly. If you can courageously choose love over fear as the foundation to stand on as you feel the feeling… that’s when the magic happens. I know this first hand. And I have to remind myself daily.

It’s true that depression is just one of many on the list of mental illnesses, but it’s prevalent so this is relevant.

Depression is symptomatic of feeling isolated and cut off. In our drive to live the good life, we typically isolate ourselves from relationships that might nourish us.- Mel Schwartz Waking Times

Orson: The report, Mork.Mork: This week I discovered a terrible disease called loneliness.Orson: Do many people on Earth suffer from this disease?Mork: Oh yes sir, and how they suffer. One man I know suffers so much he has to take a medication called bourbon, even that doesn’t help very much because then he can hear paint dry.Orson: Does bed rest help?Mork: No because I’ve heard that sleeping alone is part of the problem. You see, Orson, loneliness is a disease of the spirit. People who have it think that no one cares about them.Orson: Do you have any idea why?Mork: Yes sir you can count on me. You see, when children are young, they’re told not to talk to strangers. When they go to school, they’re told not to talk to the person next to them. Finally when they’re very old, they’re told not to talk to themselves, who’s left?Orson: Are you saying Earthlings make each other lonely?Mork: No sir I’m saying just the opposite. They make themeslves lonely, they’re so busy looking out for number one that there’s not enough room for two.Orson: It’s too bad everybody down there can’t get together and find a cure.Mork: Here’s the paradox sir because if they did get together, they wouldn’t need one.

I knew this, like on the inside of me, however reading it was profoundly gratifying. Of course we are most likely to suffer…from many things. You see, we’re not just invisible in the realm of public services and policy, but one could argue that we’re invisible everywhere we go. Even at home to a certain extent. Depending on circumstances of course. And not only can we be misunderstood by teachers and health care professionals, we may very well be misunderstood by our parent(s), friends, and extended family. Seeing as the truth of our experience has been ignored and denied, we’re also invisible in history. Seeing yourself reflected back to you in a way that is congruent with your self-image is a “luxury” we are not often afforded. And though there is no written rule on the subject, the feeling that our story is not valid and our voice is not wanted unless we surrender to societal expectations is palpable.

How about everybody just let us be and take us for who we say and show that we are? Which means acknowledging, listening, hearing and imagining into some level of empathy. Doesn’t seem like many people are interested in doing that. Perhaps because if they did, the entire illusion would crumble. Lots of identities are tightly wound in that illusion. So, then who would you all be? You’d be like me. Untethered from out-dated classifications and free to be whoever your heart tells you you are. My heart has never mentioned race to me. Has yours (to you)?

The fastest growing ethnic group in Britain is still being treated as if it is only integrated into black culture, says report

Children of mixed race are at greater risk of suffering from mental health problems and are not getting the support they need, says a report.

Despite mixed-race children belonging to the fastest-growing ethnic group, the research, backed by the National Children’s Bureau, found that they faced “unrealistic” expectations from teachers and other adults who did not understand their backgrounds.

While mixed-race young people are over represented in the care, youth justice and child protection systems, the authors said they were “invisible” in public service practice and policy.

The report – Mixed Experiences – growing up mixed race: mental health and wellbeing – drew on several studies and interviews with 21 people about their experiences as children.

Co-author Dinah Morley was concerned at the lack of understanding over what it meant to be mixed race, a group most likely to suffer racism. “I was surprised at how much racism, from black and white people, had come their way,” she said. “A lot of children were seen as black when they might be being raised by a white single parent and had no understanding of the black culture. The default position for a child of mixed race is that they are black.”

The report found that those with mixed-race backgrounds were more at risk of mental health issues because of their struggle to develop an identity. Morley said the strongest common experience was the “too white to be black, too black to be white”.

The 2011 census showed that the mixed-race population was the fastest growing ethnic group in Britain, amounting to 2.2% of the population of England and Wales.

In 2012, research by the thinktank British Future found that prejudice towards mixed-race relationships was fading. The report, The Melting Pot Generation – How Britain Became More Relaxed About Race, talked about the “Jessica Ennis generation”, crediting the London Olympics 2012 athlete with changing attitudes towards mixed race. “That positive role model is also seen as something very important,” said Morley.

Jessica Ennis is a positive role model for people of mixed race Photograph: Shaun Botterill/Getty Image

“What does it mean to be crazy? To have a disorder of the mind. But “disorder” can only exist if there is some kind of pre determined “order” set in place. And who decides on order relative to the human mind? Human society. Sane and insane is a judgment based on perspective. And according to many other perspectives within this universe, it is human society that is rampant with disorder. So there is no reason to think of yourself as insane; if the very mindset of the society that determines whether you are sane or insane… is in and of itself insane!”-Teal Scott-

1) This one’s a confession of sorts because since the Adam Lambert debacle I have not really watched any reality contestant type t.v. And by “really” I mean never seen a full episode. One can’t avoid bits and pieces. Therefore, I am surprised to find myself sitting here on pins and needles so hopeful that Zendaya will win Dancing with the Stars. The first time I watched an episode of DWTS was last night. It happened because my mom told me about this biracial girl Zendaya who is just fantastic and a judge favorite, but may need extra votes because her parents were shown on camera and that could cost her the support of… well… “certain” viewers. The only sad thing about that statement is that the concern is not invalid. So I turned the show on and lo and behold… I think that if I had more time in my life I would become slightly obsessed with this girl because I just think she is spectacular and her parents are so adoring and even if it cost her votes I’m so glad that that reality is being televised! In such a mainstream way. So awesome! Makes me happy and brings me peace! I kinda want to be her when I was 16.

2) As in second confession…. In addition to Mental Health Awareness Month, May is also National Hamburger month. Apparently I’m not one to discriminate because in the last 2 weeks I have had 3 cheeseburgers. That’s 1/4 of my yearly burger intake! In the last 2 weeks! Clearly I am celebrating National Burger Month as well as MHAM and just thought you should be aware. If burgers were alive they would probably be depressed because there is really no hope for a burger. It will be eaten. That would be beyond sad.

Since I last posted (where does the time go!?) I’ve been thinking about how the opposite of depressed is not happy. Because depression is not sadness. I fully realized this when I found myself experiencing great sadness over the fact that I was not able to witness a very, very dear friend’s wedding. I was so, so sad about it. I cried. Then I stopped crying. While I was still aware of the sadness around this though the tears were done, I noticed that I had been able to allow the feeling to pass through me and then I found myself back at peace in the present moment. (Yes, I have been meditating. More on that in some other post.) It was in that present space that I had a lovely aha moment in which for the first time I clearly felt the difference between sad and depressed. I had just allowed myself to experience my sadness without it causing great anxiety and/or influencing my every thought and my outlook on life in general. And this was awesome because I spent a lot of years trying to avoid my feelings because they were overwhelming and I simply had no earthly idea what to do with them.So I resisted them. I depressed (def: having been pushed or forced down) them. The awareness of that internal shift made me truly happy, as in pleased and content, for this is a sign that my efforts to nourish and balance my mind, body, and spirit have been somewhat successful (with the help of my therapist(s)) in calming my nervous system, and in redirecting and reconnecting pathways in my brain that had habitually spun in anxious patterns of negative expectation so that I can experience my feelings without attaching my identity to them or getting carried away by them. So that I can truly live.After that mildly profound experience, I came across the blog post below for which Junior Seau’s death was the catalyst. Junior Seau committed suicide, but was not known to be suffering from depression at the time. I am not implying that depression and suicide go hand in hand, nor am I making any statement about race. I simply like the way Miriam Mogilevsky differentiates between sadness and depression. As I’ve contemplated my own depression, the part of me that is still resistant to it’s existence will every now and then pipe up with a, “But I’m so happy a lot of the time.” And it’s true. Sometimes I am so happy. Many times. And sometimes I am not. But, whatever, because happy is just an adjective (a word or phrase naming an attribute, added to or grammatically related to a noun to modify or describe it. Happy: feeling or showing pleasure (satisfaction/enjoyment) or contentment. Sad: Feeling or showing sorrow: unhappy.I believe that I can be not depressed forever. If not forever, for most of it I hope. Speaking of which, to me depression most plainly described is a severe lack of hope. I know that one can experience a moment of happy in the midst of the hopelessness of depression. Likewise, without depression, happyness is not guaranteed. Sadness will enter. After all we are talking about the human experience here. There is no way that I will always, 100% of the time, experience pleasure, enjoyment, contentment, or satisfaction. I don’t even want that. That would lead to complacency and boredom. I do crave peace, however. That is my goal. I want to always know the way back to the peace of the present moment that I find in the center of my heart. When I can allow myself to feel that. That’s huge. Peace in the midst of sorrow and joy and all the rest of it. I can only experience happiness. I don’t think it can or should be held onto. I can actually bepeaceful though. That is a state of being that is sustainable and maintainable. That’s what I’m working toward.

Peace:

-freedom from disturbance; quiet and tranquility

-mental calm, serenity

-freedom from dispute or dissension between individuals or groups (now we’re getting loser to race)

DEPRESSION IS NOT SADNESS: JUNIOR SEAU AND PUBLIC DISCOURSE ON MENTAL ILLNESS

A few days ago I came across the story of Junior Seau, an NFL linebacker who committed suicide on May 2 (2012). He shot himself in the chest and was found in his home by his girlfriend. Although little is known of Seau’s mental health leading up to his death, he had apparently suffered from insomnia for the last seven years of his life.

Sportswriter Chris McCosky wrote a beautiful column in the Detroit News about Seau’s death and continuing ignorance about depression and suicide. In the column, McCosky shares his own experiences with depression and suicidal thoughts and laments how difficult it is to explain them to people. He notes, as I’ve noted before, that one common reaction that non-depressed people have is to wonder what the hell we have to be so sad about. He writes, “It’s almost impossible to talk about it to regular people (bosses, spouses, friends). They can’t fathom how somebody in good physical health, with a good job, with kids who love them, who seems relatively normal on the outside, can be terminally unhappy.”

The unbearable frequency at which McCosky and I and probably everyone else who tries to talk about depression get this response could be a testament to the fact the most visible symptom of depression is usually sadness. So that’s the one people latch on to: “What do you have to be so sad about?” “Cheer up!” “You have to decide to be happy!”

Because of the sheer obviousness of our sadness, we’re often forced to try to use it to describe depression. We say that we’re just extremely sad, or unhealthily sad, or adifferent kind of sad. It’s sadness that never goes away like sadness is supposed to. It’s sadness that’s out of proportion to the troubles that we face in our lives. It’s sadness that we can’t stop thinking about. For those of us with bipolar or cyclothymic disorder, it’s sadness that comes and goes much too quickly.

The truth is that sadness actually has very little to do with depression, except that it is one of its many possible symptoms.

Based on the diagnostic criteria for depression, you don’t even need to be chronically sad to be considered “depressed.” Anhedonia, which means losing the ability to feel pleasure from things that you used to enjoy, could be present instead. Under the formal DSM-IV definition, you must have at least five of nine possible symptoms to have major depression–and one of the five must be either depressed mood or anhedonia–and only one of those symptoms involves sadness. (If you so some very basic math, you will notice that this means that two people, both of whom officially have major depression, might only have one symptom in common. Weird, huh?)

So, even if your particular depression does include sadness, it’ll only be one of many other symptoms. The others might be much more painful and salient for you than the sadness is. Some people can’t sleep, others gain weight, some think constantly about death, others can’t concentrate or remember anything. Many lose interest in sex, or food, or both. Almost everyone, it seems, experiences a crushing fatigue in which your limbs feel like stone and no amount of sleep ever helps. Then there are headaches, stomachaches, and so on.

Depression is not sadness; it’s an illness that often, though not always, involves sadness. No amount of happy things will make a depressed person spontaneously recover, and, usually, no amount of sad things will make a well-adjusted person with good mental health suddenly develop depression. (Grief, of course, is another matter.) And sadness, on its own, does not cause suicide.

We need to start talking about mood disorders as disorders, not as emotional states. McCosky writes:

Junior Seau wasn’t sad when he pointed that gun to his chest. He wasn’t being a coward. He wasn’t being selfish. He was sick. I wasn’t sad when I thought about swerving into on-coming traffic on Pontiac Trail some 20 years ago. I was sick.

Junior Seau one month prior to his death

What he’s saying is that people don’t kill themselves because they’re sad. They kill themselves because they have an illness.

There is a tendency, I think, to assume that people are depressed because they are sad. A better way to look at it is that people are sad because they are depressed. That’s why, even if we could “turn that frown upside down!” and “just look on the sunny side!” for your benefit, it would do absolutely no good. The depression would still be there, but in a different form.

Junior Seau did not leave a suicide note, so only God knows what he was thinking when he died. I would guess, though, that he was thinking about much more than just being sad.

I intend to explore the impact of race on mental health, both individual and collective, in a few posts this month. And, of course, how biracial factors into it. Or, more accurately, how it factors into biracial. All I know right now is that it does.

May the force be with me.

To kick things off:

Lately I’ve been pondering my dis-ease in the world and have come to think that maybe it’s why (on the whole) i don’t talk to people much. As little as possible at least. On a personal level, anyway. Although I genuinely enjoy people, intend to love them even…but, my default mode is to just smile at them a lot…because eventually someone is probably going to say something that makes me feel invisible with an invalid life experience, and that throws me right into the center of the dis-ease I walk in this world carrying. This has led me to experience anxiety and depression. I have experienced many things in the last 36 years, don’t get me wrong. Many things in perfect alignment with the love, beauty, and sheer wonder of the Universe. But if i’m honest, I will acknowledge here that the dis-ease has weighed heavier. It has been my most constant companion, so constant I was not fully aware of it. I just thought that was life. This has affected my relationships, my endeavors, and certainly my happiness. That’s most likely why I cherish my experiences of joy and freedom so steadfastly that I have a (bad?) habit of clinging to the past (perhaps missing my future.) Nostalgia and I are super-tight. I recently bought a latch-hook Smurf wall-hanging at a flea market. It wasn’t all that cheap. Totally cute, but i don’t really want it. I saw it and for a fleeting moment a spark of pure childhood joy was ignited and i impulsively purchased that thing. Didn’t even try to bring the price down. (smh)

Clearly I digress…what I was trying to say, I think, is that depression and anxiety have been a part of my biracial experience. That’s why i speak so fervently about freeing the mind and spirit from the confines of racial identity and racial separation and a whole bunch of other issues we needlessly toil under the illusion of. I am passionate about this for a few reasons. The one I’ll give now is: because it has been my “biracial” american experience and i can only be as free from the shackles of it as is the “biracial” american community in which i live. I don’t mean a literal community of “mixed-race” people*, but the diverse community of this country. and yes, it extends to the global community as well because basically all i’m talking about is how we’re all the same thing.

*and on the other hand, that’s exactly what i mean because i believe that we are as a country and a species quite literraly a conglomerate of mixed-race people. Given that on this other hand we’re still pretending that race has any real relevance. Biological or otherwise.